Global Dexterity. Andy Molinsky
to adapt your behavior in the first place. For example, instead of focusing on how the new behavior conflicts with your own values and beliefs, you might focus on how it is aligned with the cultural values and beliefs of the new cultural setting—and how natives in that setting actually expect you to act in this particular way, even if it feels awkward and unnatural to you. Customization is the answer to how you can have your cake (personal integrity) and eat it too (effectiveness).
3 Integration: Integration means becoming so familiar and comfortable with the new way of behaving that it becomes your “new normal”: a way of acting in a foreign setting that feels automatic and intuitive. Evaluation and feedback play a key role in this process. By periodically evaluating how you feel internally as you engage in the new behavior and also assessing your external effectiveness by gauging others’ responses to your behavior, you can make ongoing adjustments in your style. The ultimate goal is to create a way of behaving that feels “just right”—natural for you and also effective and appropriate in the new setting. You will be surprised how easily this can be achieved with just a bit of strategy and effort and with the tools available to you in the rest of the book.
A few years ago I held a special forum in my MBA course in which senior managers from several different firms spoke with my students about the challenges of adapting cultural behavior. Each executive shared personal stories about the challenges that he or she had faced in managing and leading abroad and answered questions from the student audience. One particular moment stood out for me because it captured what I believe to be the essential challenge of developing global dexterity: an executive told us that the key to developing global dexterity was “to simply be yourself.” Of course, this sounded quite odd to us. How can you adapt and at the same time remain who you are? The executive’s answer was telling and has stuck with me to this day. He said that adaptation is indeed essential for success but that also, in his words, you have to make sure that you don’t “bleach out who you are” in the process.
In this book I will provide a framework and set of tools to help you accomplish this objective: to build your global dexterity without losing who you are in the process. These tools will help you make sense of the challenges you face in adapting behavior abroad and to help you manage these challenges successfully. It will take some effort, although less than you might initially believe, and it might also take some courage. It’s not easy to put aside what has worked for you for so long to adopt a completely different form of behavior. However, although challenging, this transformational experience can be tremendously rewarding—and in some cases, can even be fun. Let’s dive in.
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